


hope is the hardest love we carry

by theputterer



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Childhood Memories, Estrangement, Flashbacks, Fluff and Angst, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force-Sensitive Leia Organa, Minor Character Death, Minor Violence, Mother-Son Relationship, Near Death Experiences, Old EU Canon, Pre-Canon, Pre-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Retrospective, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-03-13 04:32:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13562883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theputterer/pseuds/theputterer
Summary: She is the first person he reaches out to, the first one to know him.She reaches back.She will always reach back.Or: the relationship between Leia Organa and Ben Solo, from the beginning to the end that is not the end.





	hope is the hardest love we carry

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Hope and Love" by Jane Hirshfield.
> 
> As per usual with me, this story is a mix of Old EU canon, current canon, and entirely made up events.

 

_“You know, I’ve had my head tilted up to the stars for as long as I can remember._

_You know what surprised me the most?”_

 

* * *

 

She’s the first one to know him.

And while this should be obvious, or typical--she’s his _mother,_ of course she knows him--she is the first to feel him _reaching out,_ as some soft thing brushing up against her mind. She understands what’s happening, is perfectly aware that this is him reaching out to her through the Force; but the fact remains that she is the first person _he reaches for,_ the first person who hears him.

Luke is sitting right next to her, entirely unaware.

He keeps chattering away to Threepio, talking about a recent trip he took to Hoth, a kind of short-lived sabbatical to see how the old rebel base was holding up. Threepio listens, and offers his own thoughts, which is kind of ridiculous, considering how much time he spent on the ice planet expressing his desire to leave and never return. But Luke has always been far too kind for his own good.

And he’s always been more in tune with the Force than her, and so if anyone was going to first feel _him_ in the Force, they all expected it to be Luke.

But her baby reaches out to _her,_ and she stills.

She’s known she’s pregnant for months, and everyone she encounters now knows it too, the breadth of her stomach entering a room before the rest of her does. But this is something new. This is her son making _himself_ known, to her.

It’s him, saying hello.

 _Hi,_ she thinks, reaching back to him.

There is a short hesitation, and she holds her breath.

And then he pushes back.

Leia smiles.

 

* * *

 

“I guess we have to start thinking of names,” Han says, one day.

He doesn’t look at her as he says it, and she knows he’s trying to play it very cool, but he kept staring at her all through dinner, and is now pretending to casually lean against the counter, and all of this put together tells her he’s spent the past week (at least) thinking of nothing else except what to name their son.

“Any ideas?” she asks, dryly.

He has a lot.

He suggests the name of his father, the name of his closest childhood friend, the name of his favorite mentor. He comments that _Lando_ would be a good name, if only for the look of mixed delight and horror it would inspire on the original’s face (and Leia is quite sure this is _not_ a good reason to name their son Lando). Han says _Falcon_ has a nice ring to it, and “It’d be neat to name my son after the only constant I’ve ever had”, and while this is a kind and loving sentiment, it would still be naming their son after a ship every other being in the galaxy besides Han has deemed _garbage,_ and her son is _not garbage._ Han even makes a valiant attempt to turn _Chewbacca_ into a more palatable, human-sounding name.

 _“Han_ is a nice name,” he finishes, and Leia snorts.

She isn’t giving her son her husband’s name.

“What are your big ideas?” Han asks, clearly a little miffed at her disinterest.

She suggests _Bail_ , naming her first son after her beloved father, the man who raised her, the man who shaped her into the leader she is today. She suggests the name of another dear Rebel Alliance councilor, who died before the Alliance had made any meaningful blow to the Empire. She suggests the name of the first rebel soldier she ever encountered, the name of another soldier who made the ultimate sacrifice, the name of a soldier who has been in the Rebellion since the very start. She even suggests the name _Luke._

“I think he’d drop dead from joy if we did that,” Han says, and she thinks this might be true, and considers that she doesn’t _really_ want to name her son after her brother.

(She does not suggest Anakin; it is a name with far too much baggage, a name of a man she isn’t sure she understands or forgives, a name she isn’t sure should survive in this family.)

She and Han sit, and think of their options.

She wonders why it is that they both automatically believe they need to name their son after someone; namely, after a dead man. She thinks this is ironic, considering the work they’re both doing now is about building a future, and leaving the past behind. Trying to create something good out of so much horror, and loss.

Building on the thing that kept the Rebellion going, that kept _Leia Organa_ going.

Building on hope.

And suddenly, she knows.

“Ben,” she breathes.

Han frowns. “Who’s Ben?”

“Ben Kenobi.”

“That old wizard?” Han exclaims, and she thinks it’s rich that he still calls Obi-Wan Kenobi a wizard, considering Luke is out and about in the universe, spreading the very wizardry Kenobi lived and died by.

_“Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.”_

The galaxy could always use more hope.

And so could Leia Organa.

And as for her son; she only wishes the best for him. She _hopes_ for the best for him. For him to be the best of all of them, for him to be better than them, for him to overcome their mistakes, and their difficult pasts, and their brutal history.

She thinks it’d be nice, and fitting, to name her son after her only hope.

And she knows it’s easier for Han to get on board with a name like Ben, than it is for a name like Obi-Wan.

“Ben,” she says, and places her hand on her round stomach.

Against her hand, Ben pushes back.

 

* * *

 

Luke doesn’t drop dead at the news they’ve decided to name their son Ben, but he does cry.

She knows he loves the idea of giving Obi-Wan Kenobi a hint of a legacy.

And Luke is following the Jedi Code to a T, and so he will never have children of his own.

So Leia and Han will carry this legacy for him.

There are far worse Jedi to name their son after.

 

* * *

 

It’s the day the Galactic Concordance is to be signed, the day Leia has spent her whole life waiting for.

The Empire has surrendered to the New Republic, and the war is over. Stormtroopers will no longer be recruited, or created. The Imperial Academies are shutting down. Coruscant is freed.

Leia is watching Chancellor Mon Mothma speak with Grand Vizier Mas Amedda, when she feels Ben violently reach out to her in the Force.

It’s a frantic, shocked sort of push, and it causes Leia’s heart to spike, the satisfied smile she’d been wearing while watching the unfolding meeting disappearing like a dead star. She presses her hand to her stomach, a cold sweat breaking out on the back of her neck.

 _What is it?_ she thinks, reaching back to him.

He’s still in utero, and isn’t capable of delivering clear language or responses, but she understands the confusion being projected her way.

Something’s happening, and it’s scaring him.

 _Don’t be afraid,_ she breathes, trying to calm him through their Force bond.

He lets her soothe him, and for a moment, mother and son breathe in sync.

And then the pain hits.

 

* * *

 

The birth is difficult.

She’d been told it would be, had grown up knowing of the horror that can be childbirth, is discomfitingly aware that her biological mother died in childbirth, and so she goes into it with trepidation, and swallowed fear.

But she wouldn’t be Leia Organa if she didn’t look fear head-on, and refuse to blink.

Her cause at the moment is birthing her son, and as she does with every cause, she gives her entire self.

Han tries to help, but as can happen when he tries to help, he becomes a bit of a hindrance, and so he devotes himself to holding her hand, and refraining from wincing when she crushes it. She hears herself sob and scream, and she hears someone escort Threepio out of the room (and whose stupid idea was it to let him in here, anyway?). She feels the pain, feels it viscerally like nothing she’s ever felt before, so much so it all but smothers the calm and kind feelings being sent her way via Luke, who’s loitering safely outside the room.

It’s only her feelings, her fear at the pain, and her rage at the pain.

And her son’s feelings.

He’s terrified, practically clawing at her through the Force, searching for something to cling to. She imagines he feels like the world is ending, and for him, she supposes it really is.

It almost feels that way for her, too.

 _Please,_ she prays, and she isn’t sure who she’s praying to. To the galaxy, to her dead mothers, to her dead grandmothers, to the dead Jedi whose name her son will inherit, to the very Force connecting them all; she only prays.

_Don’t let me die. Not now. Not after the war has ended, not after everything I’ve worked for has been realized._

_Don’t let me die without seeing him._

_Ben._

And then, suddenly, he’s there.

Red, and wet, and small, so small.

It’s _him._

 _I know you,_ Leia thinks, staring at him.

She’s as familiar with him as she is with herself. She carried him, and was kicked by him, and she talked to him.

And most of all: she _felt_ him.

She was the first he reached out to. The first to know him.

She looks at Ben, and thinks, _I’ve been waiting for you for so long._

Hope, returned. Hope, embodied.

“Ben,” Leia breathes.

Han looks like he might faint.

Ben has yet to make a noise, and once this realization sets in, Leia feels a rabid, primal terror shoot through her, eclipsing all her fears for herself, because this is a fear that something is wrong with her son, and this is a brand new fear that overtakes everything else.

“Is he okay?” she gasps, and Leia is twenty-five years old, but she feels like a child with her rapidly increasing panic.

She regrets praying for her own survival; she should have prayed for the survival of her son.

The doctor checks him over, and then Ben starts to wail.

“He was just surprised, that’s all,” the doctor says, cheerfully, and Han gives a shaky little laugh.

Ben is cleaned, and then he is passed into her arms, and mother and son stare at each other.

She feels him reach out to her, reaching out to her from the outside, and this is a new perspective, a new feeling, and it fills her with joy.

 _It’s me,_ she confirms, reaching back.

Ben blinks.

Slowly, his surprise and fright calms.

“I’m your dad,” Han tells Ben, and Han brushes his fingers over Ben’s forehead, his hand trembling, as if afraid he might shatter Ben simply by touching him.

Leia has no such qualms.

This is their son; he’s as tough as the two of them. Maybe more so.

He’s going to be so much _better_ than them.

“He’s got your eyes,” Han says, and Leia sees he’s right.

Ben’s eyes are blinking, as he slides into sleep, overwhelmed by the events of the day, but there is no denying: the shape and shade of his eyes matches Leia’s exactly. Big, and brown, and dark, and sharp.

He is _hers._

Ben’s got a fairly thick mop of hair, and while this really isn’t surprising, considering how thick Leia’s hair has always been, and how fluffy Han’s is, the shade of his hair is a little unexpected.

It’s dark, midnight black.

Both Leia and Han have brown hair, and Luke’s is blond.

Leia looks at Ben, and she thinks, _He looks like my father._

She pictures Bail Organa as she thinks it, though she knows it’s biologically impossible for Ben to have inherited Bail Organa’s black hair.

It is not until years later, as Ben’s hair lengthens and becomes wavy, as the light in him changes, that she realizes she wasn’t actually wrong.

Ben does look like her father.

It’s just not the _right_ father.

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t have as much time with Ben as she would like to.

The Galactic Concordance might be signed, but there is so much to be done. The New Republic is in its infancy, and Leia endures numerous jokes about how she’s actually birthed twins: Ben, and this brand new government.

“Am I Ben, or the New Republic in this scenario?” Luke asks her one day, trying to carry the joke a bit further.

“The New Republic, obviously,” Leia replies.

It’s the unexpected answer; but she isn’t sure it’s the wrong one.

Sure, Leia is a face of the New Republic, is considered emblematic of it, a kind of spearhead. And Ben, though a baby, has already shown multiple signs of connecting to the Force, as he has done since his very beginning.

“He’s strong in the Force,” was the first thing Luke said about Ben, when he met him moments after his birth, when Ben was cradled in Han’s arms.

No one had disagreed with Luke’s assessment.

No one ever disagreed with Luke; especially when it came to so-called _Jedi things,_ including the Force.

So it followed, then, that Ben should most obviously be Luke in this twins scenario.

But Luke is a diplomat himself, trying to find a place for him in a galaxy that sees him as a kind of deity; a savior, a living legend. He encounters worshippers on every system he visits, is cajoled into speaking about the Jedi, a religion he is still trying to understand. He makes pilgrimages, scouting out kyber crystal caverns, and old Force-sensitive relics. Everywhere Luke goes, whispers follow.

 _That’s Luke Skywalker,_ they say.

He is so much bigger than just a man, like the New Republic is so much bigger than just a government.

Both carry so much faith, and sacrifice, on their backs.

So much _hope._

And Ben; Ben is Leia’s hope.

Ben is Leia’s, period.

As Ben ages, he begins to show signs of sharing Leia’s personality. He’s prone to sudden anger, prone to a fire igniting his brown eyes, prone to hissing and enthusiastic arguing. Han, who has spent enough time with Leia to know his way around her temperament and stubbornness, traverses his relationship with his son with some unease. He maintains that while he and Ben do not share the same Force connection that Ben and Leia do, that they do share a father-son bond; and for Han, this is enough. It’s exactly what he hoped to have with Ben.

Meanwhile, Ben and Leia’s Force connection grows.

Luke and Leia have long had a strong Force connection, borne from them being twins, and from being unusually strong in the Force. Luke has been expanding his knowledge of the Force, digging through the meager archives the Empire failed to destroy, and meditating alongside the spirits of past Jedi masters, and he’s eager to pass on this knowledge to Leia; if only to have someone share the weight of the religious dynasty Luke is trying to revive.

Leia isn’t sure she wants it.

She’s already infamous enough, as one of only a handful of survivors of Alderaan (and that, preserving the legacy of an entire planet, would be enough work for a lifetime), as a heroic Alliance leader, as the last of the noble and royal house of Organa. She’s easily recognizable, with her perfectly braided or coiffed brown hair, short stature, and staggering ability to command a crowded room with little more than her smoothly accented voice and hard brown eyes.

Those hard brown eyes, the eyes she sees in her son’s face.

To add to all of this, the stigma of being the second of only two living Jedi; it’s too much.

“You can’t ignore it,” Luke warns her.

As soon as he figured out what that _feeling_ was--as soon as Old Ben told him of the Force--Luke has kept it close to himself. He’s trusted it. He’s tied his feelings to it. He uses it to guide his brand of Jedi, applies it to talents known as mind tricks and levitation, and coerces it into connecting with everyone he meets, sensing them out. He doesn’t know how to close it off.

“Why would I want to?” he wonders, when Leia asks.

But Leia is a politician, and pragmatic.

If she opens this door; she must know how to close it.

And besides; she’s able to connect with Luke, and Ben.

What more could she want? Who else could there be?

She’s happy with her twin, and her son.

And her son’s twin: The New Republic government.

 

* * *

 

“Control yoke.”

“Cwun… Cwun--”

“Close enough,” Han says, and Leia laughs, and Ben mirrors her.

The two-year-old reaches out, stubby fingers moving across the control board of the _Falcon,_ catching on buttons and knobs. The ship is safely powered down, but Leia wouldn’t really put it past her adventurous son to accidentally turn something on.

“Hey, hey, watch the throttle,” Han says, carefully nudging Ben’s hand away.

Leia adjusts Ben in her lap, and her son looks up at the ceiling.

He gasps, and raises his arms, making impatient grabby gestures.

“Gol, gol,” he yells.

Han frowns, looking at the ceiling. “The hell--”

“Han,” Leia interjects, but her admonishment is lost in her husband’s laugh.

He gets to his feet, and unhooks a pair of gold dice from the ceiling.

“This what you want, kid?” he asks, holding them out to Ben, who immediately seizes the dice from Han’s hand.

Leia is unsurprised Ben has chosen to refer to the dice simply as _gold._ That’s how he refers to most shiny objects, regardless of color, thanks to spending so much time around Threepio, who is quick to clarify he is _gold-plated,_ and not simply _shiny._ Ben now refers to all things shiny as _gold._

He plays with the dice in his hands, making them clack against each other.

“Careful, Ben,” Han interjects. “It’s thanks to those dice that I won the _Falcon.”_

Leia raises an eyebrow. “I’m sure _cheating_ had nothing to do with it.”

“Damn right,” Han says, and he sounds so fervent and pleased she might even believe him. “These are the luckiest dice in the galaxy. Without them… Well. Who’s to say any of us would be here?”

He smiles at her as he speaks, and Ben coos, rubbing his fingers over the symbols on the dice.

“Look, Da,” Ben says, waving the dice in Han’s face, and Han grins, and leans closer, brushing his fingers over Ben’s.

“Yeah, I see it, kid,” he says, going for dry but ending up closer to devoted.

 _We are very lucky indeed,_ Leia thinks.

 

* * *

 

Chancellor Mothma asks Leia to become Minister of Defense for the New Republic, and Leia says yes.

It’s barely a choice; of course she’ll do this.

Han stays with Ben while she’s away, on diplomatic missions and surveys out of the Outer Rim, and he seems happy to spend this time with Ben, but he still itches. He’s never been one to remain in one place for long, and while their home on Chandrila is beautiful and comfortable, Han finds it almost suffocating.

When Leia comes home after a two-week trip to Fest, Han takes off with Chewbacca in the _Falcon._

Han has missed her; of course he has. But this opportunity to stretch his legs and live like a younger man, to enjoy some adventure, is something he has also missed. She tries not to be upset with his quick departure; but she still is.

Ben picks up on her melancholy.

He tries to cheer her up.

During one of their infrequent trips to the beach off the Silver Sea in Hanna City, the place she likes to take Ben when they have time, as Ben seems to enjoy playing in the sand and sea, and she likes to watch his joy and hear his laugh, Ben approaches her, as she’s sitting in the sand. Night has fallen, and so they rely on the light of the stars above, and the lantern in the sand, to see each other.

“Look, Mama,” he says, and she holds out her hand, and startles as Ben slowly, but confidently, levitates two small stones into her hand.

The stones are twins, both dark blue, each about the size of the fingernail of her index finger.

“Found them,” Ben says, brightly.

She smiles. “They’re lovely, Ben. Thank you.”

For his enjoyment, she uses her own Force capabilities to fly the stones through the air, sending them soaring in spirals and whirls, and Ben grins and giggles, and chases them, jumping into the sky to try and catch them.

When he’s out of breath, she brings the stones into her hand, and carefully tucks them into her pocket.

Ben studies her.

His eyes are bright in the starlight.

“Mama,” he says, frowning, reaching out to touch her face.

He’s barely three years old, but he can already read her feelings so clearly with their Force connection.

“Why are you sad, Mama?” he asks.

“I miss your father,” Leia says.

Which is the truth.

And she does struggle with how much of the _truth_ she should tell him.

What she doesn’t realize, until much later, is how Ben hears this truth-- _I miss your father--_ and internalizes it as _I always miss your father more than I miss you._

 

* * *

 

Leia and Luke have, miraculously, managed to keep the truth of their parentage hidden. Leia has never looked all that much like her adoptive parents, and she thinks the fact of her adoption would be much more obvious if they had survived; as it is, it’s only possible to look upon their faces by digging through a handful of records, the only remnants of the Alderaanian archives, and not many people are wont to do such a thing.

Meanwhile, Luke’s legend is only aided by the idea that he sprung up from out of nowhere, on a nowhere planet, and Luke is content keeping it that way.

There are no living Skywalkers (that he’s found, and if there were, Luke would have found them) left on Tatooine to cast doubt on Luke’s true parentage.

And as for Luke and Leia; they’re not visibly twins. You have to look closer than that to see their relation.

There are only three people in the galaxy who know where Luke and Leia came from: Luke, Leia, and Han.

Leia looks at her son, and wonders how she can possibly tell him about his biological maternal grandfather.

She prefers to tell him about the Organas, about Bail’s brave work in the creation of the Rebel Alliance, quietly backed by Breha’s wealth and influence in the Core Worlds. She tells him stories of her childhood, of Bail and Breha’s clear adoration and love for her, how they cared for her, raised her, and taught her how to lead and govern. She describes Alderaan, with its rich blue lakes and tall mountains, the pale blue sky over it all, a cool sun high above. Ben learns quickly not to ask when he can see it; Leia’s sorrow comes clear through their connection.

He seems satisfied, believing he comes from the lost Organas.

Leia hopes this will always be the case, that the Organas will be enough.

But she’s also aware that he’s a little disappointed to not come from even _more._

Because Ben is _proud_ of Luke, proud to be so close to him. He doesn’t know he’s Luke’s nephew; he only thinks Luke is his godfather, is the closest friend his parents have, and these are not incorrect statements. Leia watches Ben and Luke interact, watches Luke make Ben laugh with stupid Outer Rim jokes, makes him jump with delight, while trying to catch the flowers Luke levitates for his enjoyment, and it is clear that man and boy adore each other.

Luke loves Ben like he’s his own.

“He’s a good kid,” Luke says, with a wistful smile.

Leia has, more than once, floated the suggestion that Luke buck that particular part of the Jedi Code that prohibits close relationships; after all, Luke _is_ flouting it, more or less, by being so close to her, Han, and Ben. But Luke is determined to follow the code exactly, as the most respected and admired Jedi did, because _Luke Skywalker_ is supposed to be the ultimate Jedi, the ideal Jedi, and so he cannot deviate from their set path. He’s determined not to _want_ to.

And Ben; Ben picks up on this, on the ideal Luke is working hard to embody.

The kids at Ben’s school are all aware of _Luke Skywalker_ , the galactic hero, the deity, the icon. And Ben is quick to tell them that not only does he know _Luke Skywalker,_ but he is _Luke Skywalker’s godson._ This makes Ben infamous as well, among the children of Chandrila, the children of parents who already have high admiration for Leia Organa and Han Solo.

Ben soaks up the attention.

He wears it as a badge of pride.

It’s the first time Leia worries about her son’s ambitions.

Because Leia is ambitious; if she wasn’t, she wouldn’t have gotten this far, wouldn’t have been where she is today, the Minister of Defense for the New Republic. Leia knows she’s tough, knows she can be ruthless, knows she’s willing to make a call that will sacrifice some for the good of more. She knows it can be hard for other people, for _normal_ people, to comprehend such a life.

But Ben relishes in it.

He’s eager to not only live up to the highest of standards, but to exceed them.

Leia watches her son play with a stick on the beach next to the Silver Sea of Hanna City, swinging it like he imagines Luke would wield a lightsaber, and thinks of how she has always wanted Ben to be _better_ than her, how he is a symbol of hope to her, how she has wanted him to be _more,_ and to have _more._

For the first time, she looks at her son, and worries about what being _more_ might mean.

 

* * *

 

“He’s strong in the Force,” Luke says, not for the first time, or even the fiftieth.

“I know,” Leia replies.

“Do you ever…”

Her twin trails off.

She closes her eyes.

Ben is five years old.

He’s sitting with Han, watching a broadcast of a pod race a couple systems over. Ben’s ears are unusually large for his thin face, and his hair is dark and fluffy, and he’s got a hint of freckles scattered across his cheeks, and for all intents and purposes, he looks like any other five-year-old boy.

But under the surface.

That place you must look deeper to see, to see who Luke and Leia are--

In Ben, that place is… Different.

“I sense it,” Leia says, which is kinder than saying, _I see the dark._

 

* * *

 

_Ben._

A push.

_Ben._

A reach.

“What, Mama?” Ben asks, barely looking up from his comic.

“Let’s go to the beach,” Leia says, gesturing to the bright sunlight.

Ben finally looks up, studying Leia’s soft smile, the open door leading to the warm yard in front of their house.

“Not today,” Ben says.

 

* * *

 

Ben is nine years old when it all comes to a head.

Leia is away, of course, and Han is too, of course. She’s on a trip to Toydaria, and Han is set to participate in a charity starship race set somewhere near Eriadu. Ben is left in the care of the three nannies who have stayed with him, when his parents are away, his whole life.

Sometimes, Leia thinks about adding up the dates and times to find out who has spent the most time with Ben.

She’s scared of the answer.

(She never has as much time with Ben as she would like to, and she understands this is a choice she has made, like it’s a choice Han has made, and she buries it, pretends none of it matters, that her work will justify it all in the end, that Ben will understand and forgive them for it.)

Leia is on her cruiser, headed home, when she gets the call.

The headmaster of Ben’s school needs to have a meeting with her, as soon as possible.

She returns to Chandrila, arriving for a meeting between herself and the headmaster of the school.

The man looks distinctly uncomfortable, and Leia understands this to mean that Ben has done something wrong, and the headmaster is uncomfortable telling Leia Organa, Minister of Defense, about it.

She imagines Ben has pulled a silly and inconvenient prank (Han is his father, after all) or has driven a speeder to school rather than allow a nanny to take him (again, Han is his father.)

What she does not imagine, what she has not prepared for, is the truth that Ben has caused a heavy branch to fall on a student he’s had a disagreement with, a student who has insisted Ben’s status as the son of galactic heroes and as the godson of a galactic legend does not make him _cooler_ than anyone else, and so Ben uses the heavy branch to knock the student out cold, and cause a concussion.

“Is the boy okay?” Leia demands.

Her voice shakes as she asks the question.

All she can see are the reports the Alliance would get of Vader’s movements, the stories told by traumatized stormtroopers of how Vader was prone to sudden outbursts of violence, how he seemed to relish in harming subordinates, particularly subordinates who claimed to be higher, more powerful, than himself.

She closes her eyes, and hears his voice, as if he’s speaking right in her ear:

_“Don’t act so surprised, your highness…”_

She and Luke have been worrying about Ben for so long now…

_“Do you ever…”_

_“I sense it.”_

Maybe she shouldn’t be surprised.

The boy will be fine, the headmaster insists.

They are just not sure about _Ben._

He’ll be disciplined, of course; detention, and the like. But using the Force; this is something the school has not had to deal with in _decades;_ ever, really. Ben is nine, and if the Jedi were around, he would have been found and taken to their Temple years earlier, and no school on Chandrila would have had to learn how to teach him.

But the Jedi; there is only one left.

“Why did you do that, Ben?” Leia asks, when she and Ben are home, after she’s called Han and demanded he turn around and come home, after she’s tried to get in touch with Luke for input. “Why did you hurt that boy?”

“He was lying,” Ben says.

“About what?”

Ben eyes her, through her own brown eyes.

“He said I’m not better than him,” Ben scoffs. “And that’s a _lie._ I know it. And you know it.”

Leia startles.

“Why would you say that?”

“Because he’s nobody,” Ben says. “And you want me to be better than even _you.”_

She’s never explicitly _told_ Ben this.

But she has always shared her feeling of hope with him, her wishes for his bright future, sent straight to him through their Force connection.

Whenever she’s wanted him to be better than her; it’s always that he not make her mistakes, that he not have to live in the wartorn galaxy she grew up in, that he keep his family close, that he come up with brilliant solutions to make life better for everyone he meets.

Not this.

Never this.

“I want you to be _good,_ Ben,” she says.

Ben blinks.

And then he frowns.

“I felt good,” he says, and this is not what she wants to hear.

 

* * *

 

Ben starts testing his powers.

He’s always known his mother to be Force-sensitive, has known he has a similar strength in the Force. He’s watched her accomplish simple tasks with the Force, including levitating objects, and occasionally meditating to calm herself.

“Do you have a lightsaber, Mama?” Ben asks.

“No,” Leia says.

She doesn’t.

Luke has spent _years_ trying to cajole her into creating one, but she’s turned him down every time.

She held his lightsaber once, watched the green light ignite in her hand, and felt a rush of excitement, a thrill in her blood, and she wanted to swing it, wanted to use it so badly.

But her first thought was to use it to destroy.

To destroy something small, and fairly inconsequential, like a young tree, or a chair. But Luke had always spoken of Jedi using their lightsabers when all else failed, when a diplomatic solution could not be reached, when the obstacle they faced was a beacon of violence, a champion of horror.

But Leia, an _actual politician;_ she wanted to _destroy._

To tear, and bite, and claw, and behead. To annihilate.

She shoved Luke’s lightsaber back into his hands, and vowed to never make her own.

She doesn’t tell Ben any of this.

Unbeknownst to her, Ben takes her one word answer-- _No--_ and assumes it means his mother was not strong like him, that she is not strong enough to wield a lightsaber.

(When, really; it means the opposite.)

Ben begins reaching out to things that are not her, and not Luke, but other people, creatures, and lifeforms.

He starts to be able to influence others, leading to a massive row between him and Han, when the latter catches him tricking a vendor into giving him candies for free. The row is loud, and long, and Ben accuses Han of hypocrisy, aware that Han is a smuggler through and through, a lifelong thief, and while Ben isn’t exactly wrong, Ben also insists that he knows how Han wants him to be _better._

(But for Ben Solo, _better_ is always _superior;_ never _kinder._ )

Ben tries and fails to influence Han.

Leia picks up on this one day, and it takes her a minute longer to realize what’s happening than it should, because there doesn’t appear to be anything nefarious going on.

Han is simply packing for an upcoming starship race, and Ben is watching him from across the room, and sending a strong impulse his way.

_Don’t go Don’t go Don’t go Don’t go._

She initially thinks it’s Ben silently begging through his emotions; and then she feels the strength of the gesture, the weight behind it.

She waits until Han (who has never been susceptible to _anyone_ trying to influence him, including Force-users) leaves before she goes to Ben.

“Don’t do that,” she says, softly, running her hand through his black curls.

Ben shrugs.

“He never stays when I ask,” he says. “I wanted to see if he’d stay if I made him.”

Though this impulse is a dark one, it is not an entirely _cruel_ one.

It only inspires rabid guilt in Leia.

Because Ben; he does ask for them. He’s happy to see them when they come home, happy to spend time with them, happy to play with them. And he makes his displeasure obvious when they tell him they’re leaving; he yells, and cries, and pleads.

Sometimes, he makes the room shake with his emotion.

But rather than these outbursts frightening Leia, they sadden her.

“We love you,” she tells her son.

Ben blinks at her.

His brown eyes are blank, and unimpressed.

“I know,” he replies.

 

* * *

 

“You have to train him.”

Luke sighs, setting down his cup of caf. “Leia…”

“I know you feel the dark,” Leia says. “It’s… It’s growing _stronger._ Han’s getting antsy. He’s always felt disadvantaged, because he can’t connect with Ben like you and I do, and he’s worried Ben’s going to get _too_ powerful--”

“You’re worried, too.”

Leia scowls.

“What’s the point of reading my feelings when you don’t _do anything to make them better?”_

She stops.

She sounds like her son.

And his grandfather.

 

* * *

 

Han teaches Ben how to pilot the _Falcon._

Ben is twelve, on the cusp of adolescence, and has been acting out more and more.

Leia doesn’t think teaching him how to _fly_ is the answer to this problem--if anything, it seems like it’ll only give him another thing to wreak havoc with--but she sees the way Ben’s face lights up at Han’s suggestion, and she loves it when he smiles.

He’s got his father’s smile.

They make a family trip out of it.

This includes Chewbacca, of course, who grumbles over giving up his co-pilot’s seat to Han, finding himself wedged awkwardly in the seat behind him. Leia sits down in the chair behind the pilot’s, resting her hand on Ben’s shoulder.

“What’s the first step?” Han asks.

Ben studies the controls before him.

He’s driven landspeeders, and hovercrafts, and he’s been in the _Falcon_ dozens of times (Leia wonders if he’s figured out he was conceived in the _Falcon,_ or if this is a thought he will never allow himself to recognize) yet he’s never sat where he sits now.

But he’s spent his whole life preparing for it.

His first flight is shaky, as expected, but Ben has an obvious instinct for flight, and the pride that lights up Han’s face could power multiple systems. Leia thinks it’s the first time Han has truly seen _himself_ in their son, has seen what he has passed on to him, how he might have influenced him, this teenager who he knows will surpass him sooner rather than later.

And Ben, for once, lets Han teach him.

He is eager to learn, and listen, and pays careful attention to what Han says. He laughs at Han’s stupid jokes like he hasn’t in years, and smiles when Chewie teases him in Shyriiwook, and even comes back with a retort of his own that makes Chewie howl in amusement, and Han grin.

Leia almost feels like she’s intruding on a private moment between the three of them, this disjointed family of men brought together despite their very different backstories.

As Chewie teaches Ben the finer art of landing, Han comes to find her in the hall outside the cockpit.

His face is bright, and he looks younger than he has in years.

“Should’ve done this a long time ago,” he says.

And by that, he means, he should have taught Ben how to pilot the _Falcon_ a long time ago.

But Leia thinks it is that they should have spent more time together, like this, a long time ago.

 

* * *

 

Ben is fourteen when Leia tells him that Luke is her twin brother.

She knows he’s started to suspect it, that he’s been teaching himself enough about Force signatures to recognize great similarities in Luke and Leia’s, and Leia doesn’t wait for him to confront her on it before she tells him.

“I only found out a couple years before I had you,” she says.

“I’m a Skywalker?” Ben asks, and he does not even try to hide his delight.

She can see him relishing in it, how he finds the transition from _Luke Skywalker’s godson_ to _Luke Skywalker’s nephew_ to be a grand and exotic and powerful thing indeed.

“You’re a Solo,” Leia reminds him. “And an Organa.”

“But you’re not an Organa.”

“I am,” Leia says, almost offended. She has spent her whole life being an Organa, and has no plans to abandon the name, not for Han’s nor for Luke’s.

Ben frowns.

“But you were adopted, then,” he says. “Who were your birth parents?”

“Our mother was a queen and senator of Naboo,” Leia says. “She was brilliant, and kind.”

_“Kind… But sad.”_

Leia thinks the sadness might have been the biggest thing she inherited from her birth mother.

“And your father?” Ben asks.

“A Jedi,” Leia says, and Ben’s ears practically perk up. “Called Anakin Skywalker. One of the last before the Old Republic fell.”

The galaxy as a whole does not yet know who Anakin Skywalker became.

Luke, Leia, and Han do.

But Ben; Ben does not.

Leia knows she should tell him, and knows that she will.

She just hasn’t figured out _how_ to.

Not with the way Ben has been reaching out in the Force, with the darkness swirling over him. Not when he prides himself on his connection to Luke, on his feelings of superiority and destiny, of how he believes he will be _better_ than everyone he meets.

“Was he powerful?” Ben asks.

“He was,” Leia admits. “But he made mistakes. Very devastating mistakes. He lost everything.”

“When the Jedi fell,” Ben says, nodding sagely.

This isn’t entirely incorrect.

But it isn’t the full truth, either.

The truth curdles in her chest.

“I want to be better than even him,” Ben says.

“You can be, Ben,” Leia says, and Ben grins. “You can be _kinder.”_

Kinder is better.

Kinder is _good._

But, maybe: Ben Solo does not want to be good.

 

* * *

 

Ben is fifteen when Luke decides to establish a new school for Jedi.

Leia doesn’t try to hide her relief.

If anyone can teach Ben how to be better, and how to be good; it’ll be Luke, with his knowledge and wisdom, his understanding of the Jedi Code, his experiences as a hero, his strength in the Force.

Luke, young and inexperienced, had been enough to turn Vader back, and so Leia assumes keeping Ben on the light side will be almost _easy_ for him.

Luke’s school is not on Chandrila. It’s far away.

And Ben, in a move Leia did not anticipate, becomes hesitant.

“When can I come home?” he asks.

“I imagine you’ll have breaks, like any other school,” Leia replies.

“But I won’t sleep in my bed, or live in my house, or--”

“I thought you wanted to be a Jedi, Ben,” Leia says, more confused than anything else.

Ben has spent his whole life trying to wield a lightsaber, trying to mimic Luke’s levitation skills, trying to influence others.

He’s been using the Force to reach out to Leia since his very beginning.

“I do,” Ben says, slowly. “But I…”

“What?”

Ben looks at her.

Her son is thin and gangly, going through one hell of a growth spurt, and she anticipates he’ll be at least as tall as, if not taller than, Han. But his face bears acne and pimples, his hair a little oily, and his voice jumps and creaks when he speaks.

She forgets, she thinks, that despite his power, his anger: he’s still a boy.

“You’re sending me away,” Ben accuses.

“No,” Leia says, automatically.

“Yes, you are,” Ben says, eyes widening, and she realizes with dawning horror that he’s reading _her._ “I see it. You’re… You’re scared of me.”

“Worried,” Leia says, and of all the times to tell Ben the truth, why is she choosing _now._

“Why are you scared of me, Mama?”

He hasn’t called her _Mama_ in years. As of late, it’s been _Mother,_ or, if he’s feeling generous, _Mom._

Not _Mama._

His eyes are hard and dark, and she wonders if he’s trying to pull something, if he’s trying to influence her through his word choice.

He catches this, too.

“I don’t lie to you,” he hisses. “Not like how you _always lie to me.”_

 

* * *

 

“This’ll be good for him,” Han says.

Luke has come to retrieve Ben personally, and she watches from the yard as he walks Ben out. Ben is dressed simply, and carries little, because the Jedi are not meant to care for superficial things, or fickle attachments. Luke is smiling, hand pressed to Ben’s shoulder, and Ben lets him lead him.

She’s glad that if Ben is going to allow anyone to lead him, that he’s chosen Luke.

Luke, she thinks, is the kind of _undeniable good_ that Leia Organa has never been.

Not with her failures, her anger, and her ambition.

Luke hops in his transport, and Ben pauses, and looks back.

Han gives him a friendly wave, a warm smile on his face, but Ben simply looks at him.

And then his eyes turn to his mother.

The identical brown eyes lock on each other.

 _Forgive me,_ Leia thinks, and she reaches out to him, as she did when he was still a baby in her womb.

Ben blinks.

_No._

Their Force connection suddenly turns cold.

She watches Ben go, and she thinks he takes the sun, the warmth, and her _hope,_ with him as he does.

 

* * *

 

She’s going through her dresser, about a week after Ben leaves with Luke, when she comes across two small and identical blue stones.

She pulls them out, turning them over in her hand.

She blinks, and recalls that day on the beach, when her three-year-old son smiled at her, and proudly and carefully levitated the stones into her waiting hand.

She closes her eyes.

The next day, she goes to see a jewelry maker, and has the stones put into a ring.

She never takes the ring off, and she hopes that Ben might see a picture of her wearing the ring, and remember giving her the stones.

It is the smallest, most shameful gesture of apology.

It is not nearly enough.

But, maybe; it can be a start.

 

* * *

 

“It’s going well,” Luke says.

He looks exhausted, heavy bags under his eyes, hair messy, but there is an undeniable glint of satisfaction in his eyes, apparent even through the poor hologram connection.

“I’m proud of you,” Leia says.

It wasn’t that Luke _fought_ the idea of creating an academy for a new generation of Jedi; it was something he knew he was going to have to do, sooner rather than later. But it was a task Luke approached with hesitation, and a hint of fear. Luke Skywalker is the last Jedi; there are no others. If Luke fails, if he does not adequately pass on the lessons and beliefs of the Jedi, then the Jedi Order dies with him. And Luke refuses to let this happen. He believes it cannot happen, that he must rebuild this galactic religious dynasty from scratch, on his own.

It is thoughts like these that remind Leia of her guilt, because Luke does not have to do this alone. She could simply drop her own work and help him with his.

As if Luke can sense her feelings (and, of course, he can) he says, “Congratulations on your election.”

Two weeks earlier, Leia Organa was elected Senator for Chandrila. She had resigned from her post as Minister of Defense to make her bid for the position.

(Part of Leia, a quiet, unspoken part, wonders what she would have done if she’d lost her election. Maybe she’d bide her time until a new administration, and seek returning to her former post. Or maybe she’d throw herself into work preserving Alderaan’s memory.)

(Or, maybe, she’d join Luke, and Ben, at the new Jedi academy.)

(Maybe. It doesn’t matter now.)

“Thank you,” Leia says.

“I was thinking the Jedi will need to make an appearance in the Senate at some point,” Luke says, and Leia almost rolls her eyes, because while Luke isn’t _wrong,_ he’s talking about a representation that is not necessary at the moment, and won’t be until the first generation of new Jedi are grown and knighted. “I’m glad we’ll have a friend.”

“You’ll have _lots_ of friends, Luke, don’t be absurd.”

Luke’s grin is wry. _“Luke Skywalker_ doesn’t have many _friends.”_

Luke Skywalker, galactic hero and legend, is untouchable.

Luke Skywalker, farmboy turned teacher, is friendly.

“I’ll handle it,” Leia says, shrugging. “Perhaps, by then, we can acknowledge each other.”

As twins. As family.

Luke’s smile is small, and sympathetic.

“He misses you,” he says.

Leia has to look away. “I doubt that.”

“He does. I feel it. Can you not?”

“He’s cut himself off from me.”

“And it’s taking all his energy,” Luke says, dismissively. “He’s sixteen, Leia. I was moody as all get out then, eager to keep my aunt and uncle a foot away. He’ll grow out of it.”

Leia isn’t so sure.

She’s pretty sure Ben has been waiting his whole life for himself to finally grow away from her.

 

* * *

 

She swears Ben has grown a foot since she last saw him.

Her baby has become a seventeen-year-old teenager, gangly and haughty, a couple dark moles on his light skin, black hair starting to grow around his ears.

He might look like her, but he’s dressed like Luke, in tan clothes.

They sit across from each other in a cafe on Coruscant, and for a few silent moments, they only stare.

Ben speaks first.

“You changed your hair,” he says, and she wants to cry at how deep his voice has gotten.

That’s Han, right there.

“I did,” she confirms, touching the loose braid. “So did you.”

He shrugs. “A while ago.”

“How is school, Ben?”

“Fine.”

She swallows, and thinks of what Luke had said. She tries to remind herself of what she was like at sixteen, when she was so eager and desperate to rebel, to run away from home and join a burgeoning Rebellion, that she treated her parents coolly, with an aloofness they most definitely did not deserve.

But Leia Organa might deserve this detachment from Ben Solo.

_Ben._

He stills; she might as well have yelled in his face.

He turns dark eyes on her.

“I’m right here,” he says, stiffly. “So, speak.”

“Will you be honest with me?”

Impossibly, his eyes darken.

“I am not the _liar,”_ he spits.

This is her chance.

She pauses, and looks around the cafe.

It’s a dinky, grungy place, the kind of place she picked on purpose to keep her and Ben anonymous. No one expects to see a Galactic Senator and a Jedi padawan in a cafe like this, and so no one gives them so much as a second glance; this might also be due to the thick tension between them.

She bites her lip.

 _Tell him the truth,_ she thinks. _Tell him the truth he should have learned long ago._

Ben senses her indecision, and frowns.

“What are you--”

Before she can lose her nerve, and desperate for some comfort, she reaches out, and takes his hand.

And _gasps._

Because while she can feel Ben, his prickly light, that gray flickering into dark, she can feel something else too. Another influence. And it isn’t one of the other kids at the academy. And it isn’t Luke.

And it isn’t her.

It’s something much older, and colder.

Something much _darker._

She grapples for it, following the thread that is entwining itself around her son in the Force, but before she can find a name or a presence, Ben wrenches his hand out from under hers.

He’s staring at her, brown eyes wide, and very shocked.

“What was that?” he demands.

 _“Who is that?”_ Leia snaps, all but yelling, employing all of her political charm and wisdom in forcing her voice somewhat quiet. “Ben, who is that? Who’s been talking to you?”

“Did you… Did you just invade my mind?” Ben hisses, and his shock is fading into something rapidly approaching fury. “That’s… That isn’t _right,_ Master Luke insists we can’t reach into other peoples’ _heads,_ he says it’s a violation, but you, _you just--”_

“I was following the person who is _already inside your mind,”_ Leia snaps back. “There’s a presence there, Ben! And it’s dark! What is that?”

Ben stares at her.

She stares back.

“It’s my problem,” Ben says, and whatever she had been expecting him to say; it wasn’t that.

“Ben,” Leia says, more gently now, “Ben, I can help you. You just have to… You just have to let me in--”

“You already invited yourself in, didn’t you?”

Distantly, she wonders if this is how Han feels when he argues with her.

“I didn’t mean to,” Leia says. “I was just surprised. Luke hadn’t mentioned anything--”

Ben scowls. “Master Luke says acting impulsively because of surprise is beneath a Jedi.”

She’s going to _kill_ Luke.

“I am not a Jedi,” she reminds him.

“Oh, I know,” Ben snaps, eyes dark. “You have made that _very_ clear. And obvious.”

“Ben, please,” she says, almost begging.

He swallows, eyes locked on his plate.

“I can handle it, Mother,” he murmurs. “Master Luke is teaching me how to be strong, and to rely on the Force for guidance. I don’t need you.”

He says it calmly, and dispassionately, but it still cuts her like the stroke of a lightsaber.

“Ben,” she whispers.

“How is the Senate, Mother?” Ben asks, and picks up his fork, and begins to eat.

His jaw is set, eyes smooth, expression blank.

He is her.

He is everything she did not want him to be.

 

* * *

 

“Have you talked to Ben lately?”

Leia pauses, considering her husband’s question. She settles on the unavoidable truth.

“No. Why?”

Han frowns.

“I haven’t, either,” he admits.

They finish their dinner in silence.

 

* * *

 

_Ben._

_Ben?_

_Ben, this is your mother._

_Call me._

_Ben._

 

* * *

 

“Snoke.”

“What’s Snoke?”

“That’s the name of the… person, trying to influence Ben.”

Leia stills.

“How do you know this?”

Luke’s face is drawn. He looks like he’s aged a thousand years in the four years since he took on a new generation of Jedi.

“Ben told me,” he says.

“Have you ever heard of a Snoke?” Leia asks.

She runs through her own memory, thinking about all the threats she encountered during her tenure as Minister of Defense. _Snoke_ is a fairly unusual and distinct name, and she can’t remember anything like it coming up in her work.

“No,” Luke says. “But Ben says… Ben admitted that Snoke thinks he has the right balance. Of light, and dark. He thinks he’s unique.”

The twins look at each other.

“He knows,” Leia surmises.

“He knows,” Luke agrees.

“But… _How?”_

They’ve been so careful. They’ve never acknowledged the other as blood family, have kept to their stories as longtime friends who met by chance during the war. Leia has kept her Force abilities under wraps, and in check, in an effort to not raise even the mildest suspicion. So how is it possible this person called _Snoke_ knows, when neither she nor Luke have any recollection of an encounter with him?

“Clearly, he’s strong in the Force,” Luke replies.

“How is that _possible?”_ Leia demands. “Is he a Sith?”

Luke gives a very soft sigh.

“The Force does not belong to the Jedi, Leia,” he says. “It’s possible to attune and perfect Force abilities without the teachings of the Jedi, _or_ the Sith. This Snoke character sounds like someone who’s done that. Possibly for a long time, without the awareness of the Jedi.” His voice takes on a bitter tone as he adds, “We both know how the Jedi can be blind.”

Leia considers this.

Luke speaks again.

“We have to tell Ben,” he says. “He needs to know the truth, before Snoke can tell him.”

“How do we tell him?” Leia asks, aghast.

It is a question she has wrestled with for nineteen years, since she looked into the dark eyes of her newborn son.

Leia’s feelings towards her birth family are difficult. She loves Luke, absolutely adores him, and is grateful that he exists, grateful she can have this warm relationship with him. Her feelings towards her birth mother are of a more unknown variety; she’s researched Padme Amidala, looked her up in the remaining archives of the New Republic, made a pilgrimage to Naboo to look upon her face in the artwork there. But whenever she thinks of her mother, that old, familiar sadness wells up in her, choking her.

She thinks her mother will always be an enigma. She has made peace with this.

But she has certainly not made peace with her father.

She can still feel the cold weight of Vader’s gaze, can feel his hand tight on her shoulder as Alderaan was annihilated before her eyes, can hear his harsh breathing in her ear. She had nightmares for years, of the torture she endured on the Death Star, and even now, black ornamental masks make her do a double-take. She read thousands of reports of Vader’s terrors, both during the war and in the peaceful years after, and she does not believe that she has forgotten a single act, that if she closes her eyes she can see them all, recite the hundreds and thousands of crimes from memory.

A man who unhinged a galaxy. A man who burned a religious dynasty to the ground.

A man who killed her world, and her parents. A man who was impassive about killing Han. A man who cut off Luke’s hand.

She is deeply ashamed of being his daughter.

Of sharing his blood.

And, she fears, his personality.

She thinks of her rage, the anger she fights to keep bridled and controlled. She thinks of her near-violent ambition, her willingness to do whatever the war, and now the government, asks her to do. She thinks of that delirious wave of power she felt when she held Luke’s lightsaber in her hand.

“You tried to teach me to be a Jedi,” she murmurs, and Luke startles at this abrupt change in topic.

“Yes,” he remembers.

It was the first year after the war, when Luke finally had time to seriously think about starting up an academy, and taking on a new apprentice. Leia was his ideal choice by far. His sister, someone who would forgive his stumbles and mistakes as a teacher; someone who understood the power of the Force like he did.

He taught her a few things, meditation techniques, telekinesis, reaching out to others.

And then Leia walked away.

“You said you thought you belonged in politics,” Luke remembers.

Luke is certain that while the Jedi should probably have some kind of acknowledgment in the political arena, that they are not meant to be truly involved in it. They were peacekeepers, devoted to keeping the Force in balance; how could they belong in politics?

(Peacekeepers; but warriors. And warriors are not apolitical.)

“I did,” Leia says. “But I think, too… I was scared. Of the Jedi I might become.”

Luke frowns. “Leia--”

“I’m not like you, Luke,” Leia whispers. “I’m afraid I have too much… Too much of _him,_ in me.”

“Oh, Leia,” Luke murmurs.

“And Ben is like me,” Leia continues.

_And Ben; Ben is Leia’s._

“Which means he has too much Vader in him, too. And I don’t… I don’t know how to make him choose the light.”

“Maybe, the way I got through to Vader,” Luke says, thoughtfully.

“A lightsaber duel?” Leia asks, dryly.

Luke smiles.

“No, Leia,” he says. “By choosing to forgive him.”

 

* * *

 

The next time she sees Ben, she hugs him.

She doesn’t even bother to say hello. She opens the front door of their home on Chandrila, barely takes in the sight of the astonishingly tall twenty-year-old man standing on the top step before throwing her arms around him.

Ben stiffens, his Force signature rippling in surprise.

“Ben,” she whispers.

There’s a pause, a lull during which she fears Ben will push her away, will demand an explanation, will exclaim that he made a mistake in coming home at her request.

But then he wraps his arms around her, and she feels him press his cheek to the top of her head.

“Mom,” he returns.

 _Yes,_ Leia thinks.

_That’s me._

This is who she is supposed to be.

 

* * *

 

She can’t remember the last time they spent an entire day together, and she knows there is something tragic in that, but Leia Organa’s life is, arguably, defined by tragedy, can be traced from tragedy to tragedy, and so this is typical.

They go to the Silver Sea, to a secluded stretch of beach. It’s Ben’s favorite place on Chandrila, and Leia’s, too.

They sit in the sand, and Leia asks if she can see his lightsaber.

Ben’s eyes light up, and he shoves it into her hands so quickly he almost knocks her over.

“I made it last year,” Ben says, and the pride in his voice is very real, and obvious. “Luke took a bunch of us out to a cave on Ilum, to find kyber crystals.”

Leia already knows all this, is familiar with the process of creating a lightsaber, but she listens as Ben speaks, because she can tell how important this is to him.

The lightsaber does not look like Luke’s. Ben’s is stockier, and simpler, but it’s clear he put care and time into creating it, and she’s proud, she’s so proud.

“What color is the blade?” she asks.

“Turn it on and see for yourself.”

She pauses, and looks at him. His brown eyes are big, and locked on her, and she wonders if this is some kind of test. She wonders if Ben remembers the times he’d ask her about being a Jedi, and how she’d rebuff him, claim she never took to it like Luke did. She wonders if he knows it’s a lie, wonders if he might suspect the real reasons she never followed Luke’s path.

This stretch of beach is empty, and Leia is not dressed like a Senator, and Ben is not dressed like a Jedi padawan. They look like any mother and son, and no one is around to see Leia Organa wield a lightsaber, to catch the ambition in her eyes.

And she’s very curious.

She switches it on, and a beam of electric blue light ignites.

Ben grins.

“Luke’s first lightsaber was blue,” she notes, which is better than saying, _When Vader was a Jedi, he also favored a blue blade._

“He mentioned that,” Ben says, shrugging. “I just liked the color.”

She looks at Ben, studying the delight in his eyes as he looks at the blue, and her fear and worry fades away.

“Blue suits you,” she says. “Brings out your eyes.”

He laughs, and she switches the lightsaber off.

“What color would your lightsaber have been?” he asks.

She’s thought about it before, of course.

“Purple,” she says, firmly.

Ben thinks about it.

“Luke told us about this Jedi who had a purple blade,” Ben says, and she notes how he refers to Luke by his first name, without the title of _Master_ before it. “His name was Mace Windu. He was one of the last Jedi before the fall of the Old Republic.”

“What was he like?”

“Powerful,” Ben says, the respect evident in his voice.

“I guess I would have had to settle for being the second-most powerful purple lightsaber wielder,” she says, sarcasm dripping off every word.

She was hoping to get another rare laugh out of Ben, but he only frowns at her, confused.

“But, Mom,” he says, “You’re the most powerful Force user I know.”

It’s her turn to laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m serious,” Ben says. “Luke’s strong, yeah, but you… I dunno. You’re different. If you were trained, you’d be even more powerful than Luke.”

She’s so surprised she can’t speak.

Ben looks at the sand, idly running a finger through it, creating nonsense shapes.

“I wish you were a Jedi,” he mumbles.

A wave of guilt and regret washes over her.

Unable to stop herself, she reaches out, and takes his hand.

“That path is not for me,” she says, and Ben looks away again, but she continues. “But how about this: for today, we pretend it is.”

That gets him to look back at her. “What do you mean?”

“Luke taught me some things, as you know. But how about _you_ teach me something.”

His face lights up.

They find two fairly long sticks on the beach, and Ben proceeds to teach her a few fighting stances. She’s amazed at how adept he is, though she guesses she shouldn’t be too surprised; he’s been training with Luke for five years. She’s more amazed at how patient he is, gently correcting her footwork and balance, never rectifying her mistakes with anger or annoyance, but with kindness.

The patience, and the kindness: those things did not come from her.

“You’re going to make a great teacher, one day,” she tells him, and he bites his lip to smother his smile.

She wishes he’d smile more.

He looks so much like Han when he does.

They spar on the beach, although _spar_ is a stretch. Ben indulges her, and she indulges him, and their stick lightsabers hit each other harmlessly. She’s impressed at how acrobatic his fighting style is, and she wonders at how Luke managed to teach him such an athletic style.

When she trips over a rock deep in the sand, Ben stretches out his hand, effortlessly lifting it, tossing it into the sea without a care.

“Your telekinesis is strong,” Leia marvels.

“Yours is too, Mom,” he says, and she blinks, and wonders if he’s thinking of how she used to levitate stones on this same beach for his amusement.

“Why do you think I’m the strongest Force user you know?”

Ben considers this.

“I’ve been… Learning how to hide myself,” he says. “In the Force. How to hide my… Feelings, and things.”

Leia blinks, remembers Luke talking about using the Force to hide oneself, and how Luke couldn’t think of a reason to want to do it.

But before she can ask, Ben speaks again, and derails her train of thought.

“You’re the only one I can’t hide from for long,” he admits. “Even though we’re, you know. Far. I always slip up, and find you. Luke can be just a mile away, but I can keep him out of my head. You’re a lot harder to hide from.”

He’s telling her something very important, she thinks.

“That’s your fault, you know,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“You reached out to me, first,” she says. “Before you were even born. When I was pregnant with you. I was the first person you reached out to through the Force. You said hello, and I reached back to you. So, you know, if you can’t get away from me; that’s entirely your fault.”

He laughs, but she isn’t really joking.

She reaches out to him through the Force, as he did to her when he was in utero.

_Ben._

He rolls his eyes, but pushes back.

_Mom._

 

* * *

 

They hug one last time before Ben leaves.

She watches him go, and thinks this is the start of a new relationship.

Now that Ben is an adult, he might be able to understand her better, and she him. He might understand why she made the choices she did, why she devoted herself to politics. And she might understand exactly who her son is, the man he has grown to be without her.

She thinks they can have a much stronger relationship now, maybe even one that does not rely so heavily on the Force connection they share.

Ben walks away, boarding the transport that will take him back to Luke’s academy.

He offers her one last wave as he goes, and one last push through the Force.

She mirrors him.

_I love you._

He hesitates, but his reply is clear.

_You, too._

It’s enough.

She smiles as his transport takes off.

 

* * *

 

It is not until years later that she understands that day is the last day she spends with Ben Solo.

 

* * *

 

Leia Organa is outed as the daughter of Darth Vader.

She falls into disgrace.

While she still has friends standing by her, it is clear that her reputation as a senator has been tarnished, and so she resigns from the Senate.

The truth is everywhere, in the tongues of random citizens, in the headlines across the galaxy.

And that means it has reached Ben.

She never got around to telling him the truth. She’d intended to tell him that day on the beach, a whole three years earlier, but the joy and peace of that day had strangled the words in her throat. It had been a day for family; but for the family of Leia and Ben, and only Leia and Ben.

She sits down to write a message to her son, to try and offer him comfort, during what she is sure is a difficult time. The revelation of his bloodline, and the stigma of being a descendant of a terrible man.

But Leia has never been able to offer herself any comfort in this area, to ever reconcile this truth with what she thinks of herself, and her beliefs and abilities, and her place in the galaxy.

In the end, her message is short, much shorter than it really should be.

_Ben,_

_I’m so sorry. I meant to tell you the truth long ago, but could never figure out how._

_This revelation does not change who you are. You are still Ben Solo, my son, and a Jedi._

_I named you after my only hope, and I will always think of you this way. You can still be good, and better, even with this background. I like to think I have risen above it, and I know you can, too._

_Luke can help you. He has experience with being more than Vader._

_And I will help you, in any way that I can._

_Please message me back. I’d like to see you soon._

_All my love, always,_

_Your mother._

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t get a reply.

 

* * *

 

“He’s researching Vader.”

She closes her eyes.

“Can you stop him?”

Luke sighs.

“My hope is he will see the fault in Vader’s ways,” Luke says, slowly. “That understanding Vader will help him understand why he was wrong, and why he had to be defeated. I’ve told Ben I’m here if he wants to talk about him. I’ll tell him how Vader… How he chose to redeem himself.”

Leia’s lips twist.

It doesn’t matter how many times Luke insists Vader was good, at the end.

She isn’t sure she believes it.

It doesn’t occur to her that she may, one day, come to think this about Ben, too.

 

* * *

 

For some time, Leia is adrift without a job.

She’s worked her whole life, since she was a child. A nineteen-year-old woman does not become the Senator of a planet without sacrifice and dedication. Leia relishes in the work, enjoys devoting herself to her career and her goals, and without the Senate, she isn’t sure what to do with herself.

Han is away organizing a race on Lothal, and she’s alone.

She still has not heard from Ben.

Luke is very strict about not letting family members of his Jedi apprentices visit the academy; the Jedi promoted a lack of attachment, and so he keeps his academy remote, and unknown. Leia doesn’t even know where it is. But she hasn’t heard from Ben since the revelation of his bloodline, and she’s lonely, and scared, and worried.

One night, she settles in the back garden of her house on Chandrila, and she reaches out.

She is not trying to pinpoint Ben’s location, specifically; she will follow Luke’s wishes, and keep herself away from the academy.

But she is looking for Ben, and she won’t let anyone stop her.

_Ben._

The galaxy is dark, and very big.

And while Luke has trained Leia in several ways of the Force, she is nowhere close to being an expert, or even near attaining a high level of proficiency.

But she isn’t reaching out for just anyone.

She’s looking for her son.

_Ben._

She searches.

Eventually (it might have only been minutes, but it might have been hours) she feels something.

It is not a _push,_ per se, but it is a recognition.

A flicker.

She chases it.

_Ben._

She gets the impression of a dark moor, a distant hut, moonlight and starlight--

And then it all goes away.

She’s left sitting in her garden, feeling adrift.

She thinks Ben has, at long last, learned how to hide himself from her.

 

* * *

 

“You’re quiet.”

Han runs his hand through her hair, which she’s neatly brushed out, and left hanging down to her waist in dark brown tresses. She carefully nudges their two glasses of wine away from the edge of the table, aware of wandering hands.

“I thought you liked me best when I was quiet,” she says, mostly deflecting.

“We both know that isn’t true.” He turns his head, studying her. “What is it?”

Han is not Force-sensitive, but she thinks he might as well be.

“I have a bad feeling,” she says.

He does what he always does when she’s sad, angry, or frightened.

He holds her.

She looks at the stars.

 

* * *

 

One night, she wakes up for no apparent reason, her eyes opening, her breath stopping.

She stares at the dark ceiling.

Han is not there; he left the day before for some race near Sernpidal.

She doesn’t know what’s woken her.

She reaches out in the Force, and she feels nothing.

 

* * *

 

Luke is the keeper of an ancient religion, a divine way of life, but she has never once thought of him as being something _other,_ as being a creature marooned in time.

That is, until Luke turns up on her doorstep, the morning after her unexplained middle-of-the-night awakening.

She opens the door, and immediately takes a step back, overwhelmed by his feelings.

Grief. Sorrow. Fear. Horror.

And guilt; such _guilt._

“Luke,” she whispers.

Tear-filled blue eyes look at her.

“Leia,” he breathes. “I am so sorry.”

 

* * *

 

Initially, she thinks Ben is dead, that he’s died in some horrible accident or practice session, that he pushed himself too far, that his lightsaber malfunctioned and turned on him.

And then Luke tells her what happened.

Ben’s betrayal. The academy, burning. The students dead, or gone with Ben.

To Snoke. Into the dark.

For a fleeting, and shameful, moment, Leia thinks it would have been better if Ben _had_ died.

In the next moment, she wonders: maybe Ben _did_ die.

 

* * *

 

Luke gives her a long, warm hug.

“It isn’t your fault,” she says, because of that she is certain.

Ben has made this choice. Ben chose to betray Luke. Ben chose to kill his fellow students. Ben chose to follow the dark presence in his mind. Ben chose to turn to the Dark Side.

“It is,” Luke whispers, and she holds him tighter.

Her kind, tender twin; the boy who carried a galactic legacy all on his own, who carried the joy and hope of billions. The boy who fought the dark, who defended with viciousness when it was asked of him. The boy who saved a galaxy, the boy with compassion in his heart and determination in his soul. The boy who carried the title of galactic hero, myth, legend, boy who was deified as a cosmic savior.

The man who crumbles under it all, now.

He’s right in front of her, but his Force signature is flickering oddly.

A little like Ben’s, before it would disappear from her.

But Ben has never been able to get away from her entirely; not for good, at least. And she and Luke are connected in a way she has never been able to connect with anyone, including her son. Luke will not vanish from her entirely. She will always be able to find him.

“Tell Han…” Luke sighs. “Tell Han that I’m sorry.”

“Tell him yourself.”

But Luke shakes his head.

He has already had to give one parent this truly devastating news.

He can’t do it to another.

This burden will fall on Leia, as most burdens, eventually, do.

“Thank you for telling me,” she manages.

“I’m so sorry,” Luke repeats, and kisses her cheek.

She watches him walk away, walking back into Hanna City.

It is not until years later that she realizes Luke wasn’t only apologizing for Ben’s betrayal.

He was apologizing for his own, too: for his choice to leave her.

 

* * *

 

Han is less surprised than she thinks he should be.

He sits on the couch, head in his hands, body very still.

After a moment, he straightens, running a hand over his mouth.

“That’s that, then,” he murmurs, and she would call him callous if it weren’t for the tears falling down his face.

 

* * *

 

Their combined grief is too much for them to bear.

Han leaves with Chewbacca, and he doesn’t come back.

Leia calls up Gial Ackbar on Mon Calamari, and asks if she can visit.

 

* * *

 

Snoke makes himself known.

He’s the Supreme Leader of the First Order, this Imperial Remnant group she’s heard about for some time, the group she spent her last months in the Senate attempting to warn the galaxy about. In the years since her fall from the Senate, the First Order has made astonishing moves in mobilizing its funds and numbers for war, gathering ships and recruits with a zeal that is remarkable to see.

The Senate has yet to make an open acknowledgment of the group, or to even act against it.

This task falls to Leia Organa.

With Ackbar, and a handful of other Rebel Alliance veterans, she founds the Resistance. The name could use work, but like _hell_ is she resurrecting the Alliance like that, and besides; they aren’t an Alliance. That’s kind of the whole problem. They’re an unofficial watchdog group, tasking themselves with keeping an eye on the First Order and its movements, determined to find solid evidence that it is working against the New Republic, in the hope that the New Republic will then make a stand.

Leia thinks this is all _very_ obvious, but she’s also a politician, and knows how real gridlock can be.

And she also knows how badly the New Republic wants the rumors of the First Order’s strength to be false, or exaggerated.

They aren’t.

If anything, the First Order is far _more_ powerful than they feared.

The First Order has hooks in multiple star systems, and hooks in actual senators. It has contracts on the down low with numerous galactic corporations, and is practically _minting_ credits by the million. It’s cozying up to warlords and slave traders, and running programs and recruiting children to become stormtroopers. They’re even using the same design and style implemented by the Empire.

They _are_ the Empire.

But almost worse; because the galaxy has yet to acknowledge them as one.

The Resistance is laughably small in comparison, and far poorer, and definitely outgunned, and outmanned. But they’re tough. And young.

Leia feels ancient, looking in the eyes of her soldiers and officers.

Poe Dameron is one of the first to sign up, walking with the confident swagger of any cocky x-wing pilot, and winking at Leia with the brown eyes he inherited from his mother.

Shara Bey has been dead for over twenty years. She fought a war so her son would not have to.

Leia’s grief threatens to drown her daily.

Adding to it is the fact she rarely hears from Han anymore. She knows he’s gone back into the smuggling trade, going on runs with Chewbacca. His last sporadic messages haven’t originated from the _Falcon;_ she would ask why, but she’s afraid of the answer.

He lost it. He gave it away.

He blew it up, because he saw his wife and son around every corner and nook.

Leia’s family is, at the moment, nonexistent.

Because Luke is gone, too.

She’s tried to reach out to him multiple times since he left her home on Chandrila, and he’s just… Gone. Disappeared. She’s checked the usual places: Tatooine, Yavin 4, Coruscant, Endor, even the ruins of Luke’s Jedi academy. He’s nowhere.

He isn’t even in the Force.

He’s closed himself off, something he never thought he would want to do.

And she _needs him._

She needs her brother.

And she needs Luke Skywalker, the Last Jedi.

Because while the Jedi has vanished, there is a Jedi Killer.

The name comes to her in whispers, and rumors. It tracks with the First Order, can be followed from massacre to massacre. She hears eyewitness accounts of a man in black, a man with a strange and dark mask, a man who wields a red lightsaber that cracks and sizzles like fire. A man who can stop blaster shots with a single wave, a man who shows no mercy, a man who fights like the Jedi, but with a rage that never belonged to them.

His title is Jedi Killer, but his name is Kylo Ren, and this is the name the Resistance refer to him by officially, unwilling to acknowledge the horror a title like _Jedi Killer_ inspires.

But Leia knows what his real name is.

She knew the second she heard of the Jedi Killer. There is only one possible man that could be.

Han finally answers one of her calls, and she tells him about Kylo Ren.

“It’s a stupid name,” Han snaps.

It is.

It’s also the name they did not give him.

She thinks back some twenty-seven years earlier, when her stomach was so large it was practically its own star system, when she was so young and excited, and trying to come up with a name for her son.

 _Kylo_ was never a possibility.

The names she thought of all belonged to other men. To good men.

But still: names, with baggage.

_I named you after my only hope, and I will always think of you this way._

Kylo Ren kills his way through the galaxy.

He burns down settlements, and executes prisoners, and leads stormtroopers.

He is a far cry from being her hope.

Perhaps Kylo Ren was the only name he ever should have had.

Perhaps Ben Solo never had a chance.

 

* * *

 

Poe Dameron survives an encounter with Kylo Ren.

He comes back to them scarred and traumatized, but he manages a warm smile for the relieved faces that greet him on D’Qar. She sends him to check in with a doctor, and then she seats him in her private quarters, plying him with Surian tea, and wrapping the fluffiest blanket she has around his shoulders.

Only then does Poe let his guard down.

He sighs, sagging a little in the chair.

“I’m sorry, General,” he says, and her heart breaks.

“The map was always a longshot, Poe,” Leia says, kindly.

She still clings to hope, still believes she will be able to find Luke again, with or without the map.

She’s older than she was when she last fought a war, and she likes to think she’s gained some wisdom in those years.

Wisdom, such as the wisdom of being more grateful for the survival of a promising and devoted young man, than being frustrated at the loss of a piece of a clue.

“Tell me what happened,” she says.

Jakku. The village massacre. The Jedi Killer. Kylo Ren.

Poe knows who Kylo Ren really is; he’s met Ben before, when the two were children. They are only three years apart, and Leia knew Shara Bey and Kes Dameron from the war, and they’d run into each other a few times, their sons with them. Poe and Ben never got on very well, and she thinks this is because Poe gets on well with everyone, and Ben gets on well with no one.

But Poe does not look at her with accusation, or makes mention of the fact that Kylo Ren is her son.

He speaks calmly, and concisely, and he’s a very brave man indeed.

He tells her that Kylo Ren tortured him.

“It was like he…” Poe’s eyes are distant, but he lifts his hand, brushing his fingers over his forehead. “Like he reached… _into me,_ and… Tore things out. Like he was… actually going through my brain. It was… It felt…”

“Like a violation,” Leia finishes.

_“Did you… Did you just invade my mind?” Ben hisses, and his shock is fading into something rapidly approaching fury. “That’s… That isn’t right, Master Luke insists we can’t reach into other peoples’ heads, he says it’s a violation, but you, you just--”_

She wonders if he cultivated that little horror from her.

“He knows about the map,” Poe says. “He knows BB-8 has it.”

“Well, as far as we know, he doesn’t yet have BB-8,” Leia says, patting Poe on the knee, as the door is thrown open, Connix panting in the doorway.

“General,” she gasps. “We’ve just gotten a tip from Takodana.”

 

* * *

 

The New Republic goes up in flames.

She feels it happen, sitting inside her transport, speeding to intercept BB-8 on Takodana before the First Order can get to the droid.

She remembers watching Alderaan die, and how at the time she believed the raw pain and horror in her was exclusively her own. In the years after, she came to understand it was just a sliver of what her fellow Alderaanians had experienced, passed on to her through the Force.

But she is now more aware of her abilities, and the Force, and so she feels the full brunt of the loss, as billions of lives are extinguished in unnatural red light.

The New Republic government; gone.

Her son’s twin; gone.

She remembers all the jokes people would make to her after Ben was born, on how the New Republic was born around the same time, and how it was just as much her baby as her flesh-and-blood newborn was.

She wonders if Ben, on some unconscious level, recalls these interactions.

She wonders if he ordered the execution of his twin.

_Ben._

She doesn’t get a response.

She wasn’t really expecting one.

 

* * *

 

Han doesn’t look right, lurking around the Resistance base.

He is somehow both too big and too small for the space, getting in the way and not helping enough. He stands close to Chewbacca, surveying the scene, taking note of how she runs things. She wonders if he’s thinking about the bases they lived in with the Alliance, and comparing this current incarnation to his old memories.

Part of her is interested in hearing his thoughts, and another part of her wants him to kriff off, and go back to his side of the galaxy.

But Han speaks, and the grief in his voice is as fresh as hers.

They lost Ben five years earlier.

They lost each other at that same time. And Luke, too.

Their little family, the last of the Skywalkers, Organas, and Solos: fractured.

Leia prays it is not an irreversible break.

She chooses to believe that there is still good in Ben.

She named him after her only hope, and it is her turn to put some hope into _him,_ like he did to her.

She believes he is still her son, under that mask.

It’s been almost ten years since she saw his face. Longer than that, for Han.

Han doesn’t even know what Ben looks like as an adult, and the tragedy of this fact is almost unbearable.

Leia thinks she never fully appreciated how much she missed Han until she sees him again, and so she embraces him when he’s getting ready to go to Starkiller Base, to destroy the planet-annihilating weapon that just killed the Republic they fought a war to create.

They both have hope they might still be able to save their son.

Han had once touted that he and Ben had a good father-son relationship, and Leia hopes this can be enough now.

Because a mother-son relationship was never what Ben needed. It was never something she got right. If anything, it only pushed Ben further away from her.

She watches Han leave on the _Falcon_ and imagines that the next time she sees that old, familiar ship, it will have both her boys onboard.

 

* * *

 

Han’s death is quiet.

It still causes her knees to buckle, and she stumbles into a chair.

The command center is chaos, people shouting and talking over one another, ordering x-wings and preparing for evacuation, and so no one goes to her side, to ask what’s happened.

She stares at nothing, fumbling for Han’s fading Force signature.

_Han!_

Unlike the doomed in the Hosnian System, Han does not disappear into the Force in fear and horror.

He falls into it, smoothly, with something like peace. Acceptance.

Forgiveness.

And then she knows who has killed him.

She knows this means he’s close, and so she scrambles, searching for that odd flickering light, that nudge in her belly, that pointed detachment.

She reaches out, and for the first time, she’s violent in her reach. It’s the desperate, last gasp reach of someone who knows they’re standing on the precipice of a loss they cannot come back from. It’s someone searching for a lifeline, looking for something to cling to.

It’s someone trying to find their only hope.

_Ben._

And, for a moment, she feels him.

She feels anger, hurt, sorrow, shock, pain, and rage.

It’s Ben. It’s Ben.

_Ben._

He feels her, too.

She feels him reaching out to her, slowly, and she strains herself, pushing her presence closer, cajoling him, _Ben Ben Ben Ben--_

Abruptly, it cuts off.

Pain blossoms into agony.

And Ben pulls away.

So quickly and abruptly, it’s like he was never there.

 

* * *

 

The girl’s name is Rey.

She’s astonishingly bright.

Leia spots her immediately, and she’s so stunned by the girl’s overwhelming light that she does not intercept Chewbacca, instead letting him follow after the cart wheeling Finn away to medical, Poe at his heels.

The girl stands on the tarmac, and blinks at Leia.

Her feelings are painful, and achingly honest.

She’s heartbroken, and lonely, and confused, and angry.

Leia once knew another child who might match that description.

She does to Rey what she never did enough of to him.

She pulls Rey into her arms.

“It’s okay,” she whispers, as Rey clings to her, a sob muffled in her shoulder. “You did all that you could. You are more than enough. And you can cry.”

Leia pretends to take her own advice.

She still cries with Rey.

 

* * *

 

The map is complete, and Leia’s hope, all but extinguished with the death of Han, makes another appearance.

Luke is the only family she has left, and she has a chance to get him back.

But she cannot go to Luke; she has a base to evacuate, and a war to lead.

She will send Rey, and her brilliant light, to Luke instead, and pray that Luke sees Rey for what she truly is, and what she can be.

“I have something that might convince him,” Rey says, and before Leia can assure her that Rey is all Luke _should_ need to be convinced that training her is a necessity, Rey pulls a battered and old lightsaber out from her bag.

She holds it out to Leia, who takes it, throat closing.

She’s seen this lightsaber before, but not in decades.

She never once wielded it, but she saw Luke do so.

The history of the blade sings in her hands, and she gets glimpses of its past, and its future.

A ruthless man with thick blond hair, fear in his heart, blood on his tongue.

A cheerful boy with shaggy blond hair, hope in his heart, destiny in his blood.

A brave boy with short black hair, anger in his heart, determination in his hands.

A desperate girl with thin brown hair, vengeance in her heart, legacy in her eyes.

Leia opens her eyes.

Rey is studying her, frowning a little.

“It’s Luke’s,” Leia says, confirming what Rey almost certainly already knows.

“How did you know?” Rey asks, startled, and there is no point in lying anymore.

And Leia is done hiding the truth from those she suspect need to know it.

“Luke is my brother,” she says, and Rey’s eyes widen.

 _“Oh,”_ she whispers. “Oh. So. I see. So, that means--Er. Um, I know that _he’s--”_

“He’s my son,” Leia says, taking pity on the girl, by not forcing her to say the truth.

Or maybe she’s really taking pity on herself, by not forcing herself to hear the truth.

_Kylo Ren is my son._

“I’m sorry,” Rey murmurs, cheeks pinking, and Leia smiles.

The girl is undeniably good, if she can apologize to a mother for scarring her son, even after that son tried to kill her, her friend, and succeeded in killing his own father.

“Don’t be,” Leia says, and takes the girl’s hand. “But, when you see Luke; tell him his sister sent you.”

 

* * *

 

She waits until the _Falcon_ is already rumbling and ready for takeoff, and only then does she go to Chewbacca.

For a long moment, they only look at each other, and then Chewbacca speaks.

Her Shyriiwook has always been abysmal, but she knows the words _I’m sorry_ well enough.

(Leia Organa knows _I’m sorry_ in most languages; she hears apologies far too much.)

“Me, too,” she whispers, and Chewbacca reaches out, and takes her hand.

His grief is beyond obvious emotion, only discernible in empty dark eyes, and the way he holds her hand. He clutches it in his paw, like she is the only lifeline left. She swallows, hard, terrified she thinks of him the same way.

Chewbacca speaks again, and she understands these words too.

_The little one._

The nickname he had for Ben, coined when he saw newborn Ben in Han’s arms, and was so startled at just how _tiny_ humans could be.

Ben is not little anymore.

“I know,” she says, and Chewbacca nods.

_I shot him._

She knew that, too, told to her by Rey, when the girl recounted what had happened on Starkiller Base.

“I don’t blame you,” she tells Chewbacca. “I understand.”

Chewie repeats his opening words to her.

_I’m sorry._

“Me, too,” Leia whispers, again.

She says goodbye to Chewbacca, wondering if this is the last time they see each other.

The _Falcon_ disappears into the sky, and she tries very hard not to think about how she’d felt the last time she watched it takeoff, when she still had hope in her heart and love in her throat, and the warmth of a husband’s adoration in her soul.

 

* * *

 

She looks at herself in the mirror in her quarters.

Her hair seems to become grayer by the hour, silver strands threatening to overtake the rich brown. She lets it down, studying her tresses, taking in the way they fall and frame her brown eyes. Her eyes, at least, have not changed; even while the skin around them has.

She lifts her hand, and touches her cheek, feeling the wrinkles and age lines under her fingers.

Her sight catches on the ring on her finger.

The two blue stones, unchanged by time.

_“Look, Mama,” he says, and she holds out her hand, and startles as Ben slowly, but surely, levitates two small stones into her hand._

_The stones are twins, both dark blue, each about the size of the fingernail of her index finger._

_“Found them,” Ben says, brightly._

_She smiles. “They’re lovely, Ben. Thank you.”_

She has to close her eyes, banishing the sight of that little boy away. When she opens her eyes again, she considers the ring on her finger.

The twin blue stones. She knows so many sets of twins.

Luke and Leia. Ben and the New Republic.

And, maybe: Ben Solo and Leia Organa.

Turning away from the stones, she begins to gather her hair together, coiling it into the shape of the Alderaanian mourning braid. It is a small, pathetic tribute to Han, but it is all she can do for him now. Perhaps later, when she goes home--

If. If she goes home.

Leia has long believed she will live and die by war.

She knows now that she will not survive this war.

She is not even sure she _wants_ to.

Carefully, she arranges her hair into the mourning braid, tugging the ring through when it catches in her hair.

She doesn’t take it off.

 

* * *

 

The First Order comes for them.

She knew it would, knew it would only be a matter of time; they know where they are on D’Qar, and even with the loss of their devastating planet killer, the First Order is still more than capable of mounting a serious attack on the Resistance base.

They’re halfway through their evacuation when the first Star Destroyers reach them.

The _Raddus_ is already launched, hovering above D’Qar, receiving the transports filled with Resistance soldiers. Leia stands on the bridge, listening to the chaos around her, her officers and pilots yelling orders to one another. Even with the Star Destroyers on the horizon, she feels pretty good about their odds in completing their evacuation before the First Order can send missiles onto the base.

And then the Dreadnought appears.

 

* * *

 

They track them through lightspeed.

_The First Order tracks them through lightspeed._

It is a thing that should not be possible, but somehow… is.

Leia has lived through a lot, has experienced a lot of things that should not have been possible, but part of her thinks this moment, the First Order following their flight through lightspeed, tops it all. This thought is amplified by the precarity of their situation.

The Resistance is very, very close to total annihilation.

There are so few of them left.

She pushes her shock away.

“Permission to get into an x-wing, and blow something up?” Poe asks.

Poe Dameron: cocky, determined, stubborn, fearless.

And a good man, who will one day make a truly exceptional leader.

She prays she will live to see that day, live to pass the Resistance on to him, and a handful of others.

Like Connix, and Finn, and all those young, determined eyes she sees everyday.

“Permission granted,” she says, and turns, already ordering Ackbar to swing them around.

The missiles and bombs begin to drop just moments later.

She can hear screams coming from the hangar of the _Raddus,_ and then she _feels_ the screams, feels them lengthen, feels them rise in pitch and fear, just before they cut out. She closes her eyes. She knows what it all means.

She’s feeling her people die around her.

It’s Alderaan, once again.

_Is this the end?_

She turns her head, and suddenly--

_Ben._

He’s near, very near. She stands still, and keeps her eyes open, refusing to blink, and she _reaches--_

And he reaches back.

It is hesitant, and wary, but it’s him.

It’s her son.

She’d know him anywhere.

 _Ben,_ she breathes.

For a moment, she’s twenty-five again, and the baby in her belly is reaching out to her, pushing on her mind, and she is pushing back, and this is how they introduce themselves.

And then she blinks.

And it’s her on a crumbling ship.

And it’s Ben, in a TIE fighter, destroying that ship.

This is another kind of introduction.

She knows he can see her.

He knows where she is.

She feels the indecision, feels him warring with himself. He knows what he is expected to do, what he should do, maybe what he _must_ do.

She holds her breath.

_Ben._

He is silent.

But then he seems to still all at once. He backs down.

She breathes.

He breathes with her.

Mother and son, in sync. Mother and son, poised for destruction, breathing together like they did the day he was born, when they both felt like the world was ending, that they were going to die.

_He’s still in utero, and isn’t capable of delivering clear feelings or responses, but she understands the confusion being projected her way._

_Something’s happening, and it’s scaring him._

_Don’t be afraid, she breathes, soothing him through their Force bond._

_He lets her soothe him, and for a moment, mother and son breathe in sync._

_And then the pain hits._

The bombs still come.

Yet they do not come from his fighter.

She closes her eyes, aware that this is it, that she is going to die.

She only has moments.

_Goodbye, Ben._

The last thing she feels before the bombs hit and send her flying is Ben, pulling away from her.

 

* * *

 

Cold.

_“You’re the most powerful Force user I know.”_

Darkness.

_“Your telekinesis is strong.”_

Warmth.

_“Yours is too, Mom.”_

Light.

_“You reached out to me, first. Before you were even born. When I was pregnant with you. I was the first person you reached out to through the Force. You said hello, and I reached back to you.”_

She opens her eyes.

She’s alone.

She cannot feel Ben.

She cannot feel anything.

Still; she reaches out.

And she gets to where she needs to go.

She finds the hope she’s spent her whole life trying to grasp.

The Resistance clings to her.

 

* * *

 

There’s someone watching her.

She turns her head.

The little boy is peeking out at her, watching her from behind the gray wall, only his head visible. His curls are dark and thick, his eyes big and brown, and she would know him anywhere, in any form, in any universe.

“Ben,” she calls.

The boy smiles, and ducks away, disappearing down the hall.

She walks up the ramp.

The _Falcon_ looks the same as it always does, as it seemingly always has. She can feel the slightly loose covers of the storage compartments under her feet (and her feet are bare, when did that happen?) and the ship is shockingly quiet, more quiet than it’s ever been. She’s grateful for the quiet, though; it allows her to hear the boy’s giggle.

“Ben, where are you?” she calls, keeping her voice light and joking.

A giggle is the only response.

She ducks into the galley, opening empty cabinets, peering under counters. She walks into the crew’s quarters, checking under bunks. She crouches under the hologram board. She carefully opens up cupboards in the engineering bay, and pries open floorboards to look below.

She’s aware that she’s cold, and when she lifts a hand to touch her face, she’s startled at the smooth skin her fingers brush, the lack of age lines.

Part of her doesn’t know why this is odd to her.

A laugh interrupts her thoughts.

She follows the noise again.

“Ben? Ben?”

_Mama._

“Ben,” she says, smiling, moving with more confidence.

She no longer relies on the sound of his laugh. She relies on his presence, on him reaching out to her.

_Mama!_

“I’m coming,” she yells, and makes her way into the cockpit, a wide smile on her face, and--

It’s empty.

The dingy and torn seats are glaringly vacant, the dash in front entirely powered down. There is no child hiding under foot, or pressed into a corner.

She stands in the small space, and looks around.

She’s alone.

Frowning, she sighs, and puts a hand on the back of a headrest.

_Han shoves her aside, jumping into the seat, staring down at the asteroid field ahead of them--_

_Luke, cradling his handless arm against his chest, stares unseeingly at a black sky--_

_Chewbacca roars, shoving C-3PO backward, into her arms--_

_Yes, I know,_ Leia thinks, _I was here, I remember this--_

A new memory.

_A man in a black mask stands over the seats, hands wrapped around the backs. “Han Solo.”_

“Ben,” Leia gasps, eyes flying open, unaware of even having closed them.

“Not Ben.”

She turns around.

Of course he’s here.

Han smiles at her, looking just as he did the day they met, white shirt and black pants, DL-44 at his hip, cocksure grin on his face, mischief in his eyes.

She breaks.

Han’s embrace is warm.

“I know,” he whispers into her hair, and she laughs at the old joke.

“Where’s Ben?” she asks.

Han swallows, and looks around.

“Here, sometimes,” he replies, and she’d forgotten how much she’s missed his voice. “But not all the time. He’s always little when he’s here, though. Asking me about learning to pilot, wanting to fix up things.” Han sighs. “I should have spent more time with him.”

“It’s not your fault.”

Han looks at hers. “It isn’t yours either, sweetheart.”

The endearment brings tears to her eyes.

“He’s gone, isn’t he?”

Han guides her down into the co-pilot’s seat, taking his regular place in the pilot’s chair.

“He was gone for me,” Han says. “I couldn’t reach him. I saw it, just before he… Well. You heard. It was too late for me, I think. Too late for me to save him.”

Leia sobs. “It’s too late, oh gods, it’s too late for him--”

“Hey, hey. That isn’t what I said.”

She looks up.

Han’s eyes are gentle, infinitely more gentle than hers have ever been, and she thinks of that day on the beach and reflecting on Ben’s surprising kindness, and she thinks, _Oh._

“It was too late for _me,”_ Han says. “Too late for me to save him. I wasn’t… Look, I may have been on time once or twice, but with that kid? I was always late. So I couldn’t save him. The only thing I could do is forgive him, try to remind him he isn’t, you know. Irredeemable. I like to think I might have shoved a foot in that door.”

“You’re good at that, getting in the way,” Leia mumbles, and he laughs.

“But I ain’t the one who can bring him home.”

His hand is warm on her face.

“That’s all you, Leia,” he says. “Ben, he… He was always yours, first. And I’m not bitter about that. To be frank, I’m pretty glad. The galaxy could always use more Leias.”

“That’s not true,” she insists, but Han rolls his eyes.

“Give the dead man a break, will ya?”

A thought occurs to her.

She probably should have realized it before, the second she saw her three-year-old son looking down the ramp of the _Falcon._

“I’m dead,” she breathes.

“Nah,” Han says. “Not yet.”

As if to confirm this, she feels a soft _push_ against her mind. For a second, she thinks it’s Ben; but then the feel of the push reaches her, and it’s so old and so familiar and so precious to her.

“Luke,” she whispers.

_Leia._

Han smiles. “That’s your cue.”

He turns away from her, hands moving about the _Falcon,_ like he’s readying her for a take-off.

Leia watches.

“I miss you.”

Han glances at her, and smiles.

“I know.”

“You have got to stop saying that,” she says, and he laughs.

“I’ll stop saying it when it stops being true,” he replies. A moment later, he adds, “I love you. I’ll see you later.”

“See you later,” Leia repeats.

Everything fades away.

 

* * *

 

When she wakes, she learns Poe and a handful of others have committed a mutiny.

 _Dammit Dameron,_ Leia thinks, staring down at Poe’s unconscious form.

“How are you feeling, General?” a very nervous and harried Connix asks her.

“Good as new,” Leia grunts, even though she feels anything but.

Connix hesitates, and then bursts out, “How did you do that. The, uh… The moving. Space. With the… reaching. The Force?”

Leia thinks she’s never heard her lieutenant sound so flustered before. She almost wants to laugh.

“I like to think I’ve learned a thing or two over the years,” Leia replies.

“When we saw you…” Connix swallows, and Leia’s heart swells at the realization that Connix’s shakiness might have to do with her fear that Leia had been killed. “You didn’t look… good. We thought you didn’t make it. We thought we were too late.”

Too late.

_“It was too late for me, I think. Too late for me to save him.”_

The words sound faintly familiar, like she’s heard them recently, but she can’t imagine where.

She shrugs them away.

“Get to the hangar, Lieutenant,” she says. “And make sure Dameron is on my transport.”

 

* * *

 

Crait hasn’t changed a bit.

She didn’t think it would, but, well; a lot has changed.

Herself included.

She stands just behind the blast door, and stares out over the salt flats. The wind is minimal, but she keeps her collar up, if only to prevent grains of salt from flying into her mouth and nose. She watches the salt flicker and dance through the air, and for a moment, it looks like snow.

_“Han, we need you.”_

“We _need me? Well, what about_ you _need me?”_

Hoth fades away.

She’s alone.

 _I’m so tired,_ Leia thinks.

The Resistance is in shambles all around her, and part of Leia thinks that this is okay.

She just wants it to be over.

It’s a shameful, despicable thought for a general to have, but Leia is exhausted, body and soul.

Han is dead. Amilyn is dead. Luke is gone.

Ben is…

_“Why are you sad, Mama?”_

_“I miss your father.”_

In her memory, her three-year-old son blinks at her, all big brown eyes.

 _I miss you,_ Leia thinks. _I’m so sorry, Ben._

At long last, she thinks she understands the loneliness Ben must have felt. Not only because his parents were constantly gone; but because he felt so unique. She’d always believed he wore his uniqueness as a badge of honor, considered it to be a source of pride, but she thinks about how she has lived most of her life as one-of-a-kind. The last Princess of Alderaan. The youngest Rebel Alliance commander. The first Minister of Defense for the New Republic. The sister of the Last Jedi.

Ben Solo: the only child of Rebel Alliance legends Leia Organa and Han Solo. Ben Solo: the only grandchild of Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala. Ben Solo: the only grandchild of Darth Vader. Ben Solo: the only nephew of Luke Skywalker.

The only, the only, the only.

If only, if only, if only.

Maybe his quest to be the best, to be _better,_ was simply a quest to make sense of his uniqueness.

To understand it, and figure out how to make something of it.

Maybe he could only be proud of it, because to really consider it was to be suffocated under the weight of so many accomplishments, so many legends, so many ghosts.

_I named you after my only hope._

But that isn’t correct.

She didn’t have to name him Ben to make him her only hope.

She only had to call him her son, and be his mother.

The name never mattered.

 

* * *

 

The next time she senses Ben, he feels far more different than he ever has before.

For one thing: he no longer feels like hers.

The darkness she always was able to sense in him; it’s expanded. It’s swallowed him whole, and the only reason she knows Ben is in the First Order _Upsilon-_ class command shuttle staring down what’s left of the Resistance is the fact that she once carried that darkness inside her.

When she carried Ben.

And when she knew how to reach out, and _feel._

Because that darkness; it’s in her, too.

The difference is simply that Leia Organa knows how to choose the light. She knows to be good, and to embrace justice, and fight for democracy and peace.

Being good is a choice, and she thinks it was a choice she never taught Ben to make, or to value.

She should never have impressed this idea of _betterness_ upon him.

That was her mistake.

She, and Ben, and the galaxy, are paying the cosmic consequences of it.

The man in the shuttle is not her son.

Except that he is.

He always will be.

_All my love, always._

She will always love him, but he will not always love her.

 

* * *

 

Hope is a fragile thing.

Leia has spent her life carrying it, and transporting it, and hoisting it up for others to see, and to cling to. Most of the time, hope is the only thing keeping her going. Hope, and faith, and belief, and Leia Organa. Arguably, the one thing that might be able to define Leia is this simple idea of hope.

But someone else, she thinks, embodies hope more.

When she sees him, she thinks he hasn’t aged at all.

But then she reaches out, and she realizes: Luke isn’t here. Not really.

Except that he is.

In the most important of ways: he’s here, with her, at the end.

“I came to face him,” Luke tells her.

She nods, and her heart breaks.

“I know my son’s gone.”

_It’s just him, saying hello._

_Hi, she thinks, reaching back to him._

_There is a short hesitation, and she holds her breath._

_And then he pushes back._

Luke looks at her.

“No one is ever truly gone,” he says.

She stares at him.

Luke reaches out, and drops a pair of gold dice into her palm.

_“Look, Da!”_

_“Yeah, I see it, kid.”_

The dice are unchanged.

Some things never change.

Luke stands, and presses a kiss to her forehead.

Hope is a fragile thing.

It takes many forms.

Hope that you are doing the right thing. Hope that your gutsy plan will pan out. Hope that you can trust this stranger. Hope that someone will hear you, and come help.

Hope can come organically. It can be manufactured. It comes in unexpected forms. It comes in roundabout ways. It can be very last minute.

Hope can be found in a name. But it is not only a name.

A long time ago, Leia Organa believed Obi-Wan Kenobi was the only hope left for the galaxy.

She realizes, now, that it’s Luke Skywalker.

It’s always been Luke Skywalker.

She looks into her twin’s blue eyes, eyes that she has seen weighed down by destiny and despair, eyes clouded by confusion and determination. She looks at Luke, and sees the farmboy tasked with reviving a religious dynasty. She looks at Luke, and sees the man behind the legend, sees the person who has always tried to do his best, who has worked hard at being good, at doing the right thing.

Luke, who entered her life as the new hope the galaxy needed.

Luke, who will leave her life fulfilling the premise of hope.

The belief that something better can follow.

_“He said I’m not better than him,” Ben scoffs. “And that’s a lie. I know it. And you know it.”_

_“Why would you say that?”_

_“Because he’s nobody. And you want me to be better than even you.”_

_“I want you to be good, Ben,” Leia says._

She has made a thousand mistakes.

And Luke has, too. Of course he has. Of course they have.

They were young, so young, and the galaxy asked so much of them. Of the Skywalker twins. Of the descendents of Jedi. Of the descendants of royalty.

At some point, the galaxy forgot that Leia Organa and Luke Skywalker are only human. And they forgot that, too.

Human, prone to mistakes.

Mistakes that can have galactic consequences.

Mistakes that, perhaps, can only be fixed by cosmic intervention.

She watches Luke walk away.

The ghosts, the myths, the whispers, the folklore, the legends; they all walk with him.

For the first time:

He chooses it.

He chooses to become what they need him to be.

The legend they always knew he could be.

 

* * *

 

Poe Dameron is ready to lead.

He’s more thoughtful, wiser, considerate of the big picture, and how the future may play out.

She always knew he could become this man, this leader the galaxy deserves.

She’s grateful she has lived to see it.

 

* * *

 

The last time she sees Ben, he isn’t Ben.

Not obviously.

He’s furious. Spitting. Cruel, and dark.

But if you look closer, if you look _deeper:_

He’s got Han’s thin face, and Luke’s chin.

He’s got her thick hair, her nose, and her dark eyes.

And, most of all: he inherited her power. Her anger. Her ambition. Her capabilities to tap into, and reach, and sway the Force.

None of that came from Luke, nor from Vader.

It always came from her.

He will always be hers.

Even when he doesn’t want to be. Even when he chooses not to be.

Some things do not change. Some things cannot be erased.

She can, at last, admit he is not Ben Solo. He used to be, but he clearly isn’t anymore.

He’s Kylo Ren.

This does not mean he is not her son.

This does not mean he is not hers.

 

* * *

 

She feels Luke pass.

It does not make her as lonely as she feared it would.

She looks around her, taking in the young faces, the awe and amazement, that relieved and exhilarated joy that comes when you have cheated certain death. And it’s all thanks to, and made possible by, Luke Skywalker.

The human made legend. The legend made human.

And around and around again.

And now: she’s back in the _Falcon._

She’s home.

“We have everything we need,” she tells Rey.

The girl is bone-weary, and tired, and looks like she has lived a thousand years since Leia last saw her.

She clutches the two halves of Luke’s old lightsaber in her hands.

Luke Skywalker dies as the last Jedi. But that does not mean the Jedi cannot return.

Leia covers Rey’s hand with her own, her fingertips brushing the cool metal of the lightsaber.

She does not see the past.

Not this time.

She looks into the future.

 

* * *

 

They take off, preparing for the jump to hyperspace.

Leia brushes her hands over the shoulders of every remaining Resistance soldier, offering unspoken comfort and approval. They glow under her hands, eyes wide and shining, and she is so proud of them all.

The future, she thinks, is still bright.

Hope lifts the _Falcon._

She makes her way to the cockpit, to find Rey in the co-pilot’s seat and Poe in the pilot’s seat. Finn sits behind Rey, leaning in close, and the three of them are smiling and laughing, and talking loudly over one another, trying to trade stories and news all at once. Leia stands in the doorway, and watches.

When she blinks, she thinks she can see a different trio gathered in the cockpit: a smuggler, a farm boy, and a princess.

She blinks again, and realizes the cockpit has gone quiet, the three young people staring at her.

“Don’t mind me,” she says, waving a hand.

She settles into the chair behind Poe, thinking fondly of all the times she’d sit here, eyes locked on the back of Han’s head as he piloted, his shoulder warm under her hand.

The three young people have not resumed their conversation, likely unsure about why she’s in this space at all, so Leia makes a big show of reclining, and making herself comfortable, pulling her cape up to cover the lower half of her face. She closes her eyes, and she waits.

Eventually, the friendly chatter starts up again, though quieter this time.

She opens her eyes.

The stars are bright above her, and she tilts her head up, taking them in.

She has looked at a million stars, and yet, somehow, they always take her breath away. They make her feel small. They remind her of what’s important, and what she needs to remember.

_His eyes are bright in the starlight._

_“Mama.”_

Here and now, Leia reaches out to her son, on the planet far below.

One more time.

Regardless of his response; regardless of his reaction. No matter if he doesn’t reach back; no matter if he violently shoves her reach away. She won’t be stopped. She will remind him she’s there, and waiting. She will remind him that she forgives him.

She reaches out to him.

One more time.

She will always reach out one more time.

 

* * *

 

_“You know, I’ve had my head tilted up to the stars for as long as I can remember._

_You know what surprised me the most?_

_It wasn’t meeting them._

_It was meeting you.”_

 

\- **Arrival** (2016), screenplay by Eric Heisserer

 

**Author's Note:**

> ARRIVAL (2016): directed by Denis Villeneuve, screenplay by Eric Heisserer, based off the short story "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang.
> 
> The Galactic Concordance is a canon event, as is the birth of Ben Solo occurring the same day. Leia becoming Minister of Defense occurred in the Old EU. Leia's ring appears in TFA and TLJ but its backstory is made up here. Leia being outed as Vader's daughter, and the fallout, and this being how Ben finds out, comes from "Bloodline" by Claudia Gray. The rise of the First Order and creation of the Resistance mostly taken from current canon. A deleted scene from TFA has Kylo Ren boarding the Falcon on Starkiller Base.
> 
> This story was inspired by that scene in TLJ when Leia and Kylo, like; Force-connect, and Kylo decides not to fire on her ship. Carrie Fisher and Adam Driver were so emotive in that moment, and I just. I LOVED it. TLJ also helped me understand Ben/Kylo, a character I did not get at all in TFA. The idea that so much of his story was down to choice is interesting to me, and I wanted to consider how that might apply to Leia, as well: and how love can be both instinct, and a choice.
> 
> For those keeping score at home, the Fima and Ersa story is still not done, and has stalled. if anyone wants to finish it for me, let me know.
> 
> If you liked this story, please do drop a line either here, or on tumblr:
> 
> [tumblr](http://theputterer.tumblr.com)


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